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Venezuela: Communal power in Caracas

Wilder Marcano.

Wilder Marcano interviewed by Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber

July 4, 2010 -- The
Bullet -- We caught up with Wilder Marcano, director of the network of comunas [communes] in
Caracas, on the morning of June 18, 2010. He talked with us just before
addressing a crowd of a few hundred representatives of different comunas
from around the capital who had gathered in the offices of the Ministry
of Popular Power for the Communes and Social Welfare to discuss a whole
series of issues related to building popular power from below in the
poorest barrios.

What is the role of the comunas in the construction of
socialism in Venezuela?

In Venezuela we have a national political
project for the country. In relation to organisations of popular power
we have the communal councils, and the commune is the principal organ of
this political project. This project has to have a strategic
orientation, and at the heart of this is the stimulation and
participation of the people. We believe that building up from the
starting point of the comuna is the way of realising and concretising
the political project. The comuna is a way of radically reorganising
territory, a geographical radicalisation in which human beings are put
at the centre, where the real needs of human beings are responded to,
and from where a distinct form of economy can be constructed. The new
economy needs to replace the failed capitalistic economy, and the new
economy needs to be based in the principles of socialism.

What are the most important
challenges facing the comunas?

The biggest challenge is that we have to break with
the old way of doing politics here in Venezuela. One example is the need
to build a participatory rather than representative democracy. In the Bolivarian constitution it stresses that our democracy has to be participatory
and protagonistic.

This means that the people have to liberate themselves from their
fears and anxieties and assume their role in the construction of this
new reality. Breaking with the old way of doing politics, having people
become protagonists is one of the biggest challenges we face.

The second challenge has to do with the theme of the economy, which
is a tremendously important issue. We need to make the comunas centres
of production for the people, and we need to improve their organisation.
Why? Because we’re talking about breaking from a system with hundreds
of years of history, which has left behind an ideology of capitalism
that is deeply ingrained in people. This ideology has many mechanisms
through which it reproduces itself.

Our socialist project is not yet fully understood at the grassroots
level. There is still a great deal of learning and education that has to
take place. This is part of the role of the party [the PSUV], and is
necessary in order to build a new economy based in the values of
socialism.

What is your vision of socialism in the long term?

In the concrete case of Venezuela, we see socialism
as a path of opportunity. If we look around the world at all the
tragedy, if we look at our own tragedies in the history of Venezuela,
it’s clear that the capitalist system does not function. We see
socialism as a way of making our independence that began with Simón Bolívar real and authentic. We see it as the
way in which we can build a new and distinct reality for Venezuela, in
which the needs of human beings are placed at the centre, where the
hateful inequalities of capitalism are overcome, where we have real
freedom in all the sphere of social life, a society which is not run by
the private owners of the means of production and the owners of the
media.

In essence, a country in which children can pursue an enriching life,
where they can study, be guaranteed education and health, where they
have security, where they can have the possibility to be happy and free.
This is the vision that we have.

We can see that there are really two central facets to
the struggle from below in this country. The struggle for workers’
control, on the one hand, and the struggle for popular power in the
comunas, on the other. What needs to be done to facilitate the union of
these two sets of struggles?

This is the fundamental task that the PSUV is taking
up in its leading role in the struggle for liberation of society in its
totality. Workers’ control has to do with controlling and managing the
means of production, with the takeover of enterprises. The comuna has
to do with territorial control in the communities, with themes of
production in these locales, with meeting the needs of the people in
their neighbourhoods. Their objectives in many ways are the same. It’s
about people having control over every aspect of their lives. The PSUV is one mechanism for uniting these aims, and it draws from
these sources, because it has the long term vision of building
socialism.

[This article first appeared at The
Bullet, the website of Canada's Socialist Project.
Susan Spronk teaches in the School of International Development and
Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is a research associate
with Municipal Services Project and has published several articles on
class formation and water politics in Bolivia. Jeffery R. Webber teaches
politics at the University of Regina. He is the author of Red
October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill, 2010)
and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous
Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).]